Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
it did during the night,” the expedition’s chief engineer reported. The bottom land
along the river “soon became a sea of mud, in which wagons settled to the axles
and mules floundered about without a resting place for their feet. . . . The rain came
down in torrents, putting out many of the fires, the men became exhausted, and
both they and the animals sank down in the mud and mire, wherever they were, to
seek a few hours’ repose.” 40
The infantry began to cross the bridge at daylight, the battered 1st Kansas
Colored toward the head of the five-mile column, the 2d Kansas Colored much
farther back. By 8:00, the 2d had moved as far as the bridge, hearing all the while
the sound of small-arms fire as the Union rearguard exchanged shots with pursuing
Confederates. As the firing increased, Col. Samuel J. Crawford, commanding
the regiment, turned his men around and marched back toward the fighting. They
arrived in time to relieve another regiment that had nearly exhausted its ammunition.
Partly concealed by trees and underbrush at the edge of an open field, officers
of the 2d Kansas Colored walked back and forth along the line to observe
the men’s firing and to correct their aim when necessary. “Soon the rebel fire was
not so effective as at first,” one officer recalled. “The leaves and bark fell from the
trees, cut off eight or nine feet high. Their fire gradually slackened—wavered—
stopped.” Toward noon, Confederate artillerymen struggled through the mud with
three cannon and managed to fire a few shots at the Union line. The 2d Kansas
Colored and the 29th Iowa charged some two hundred fifty yards across the open
field and captured the guns, killing or wounding ten of the gunners and all but two
of their horses. Early in the afternoon, word came to retire and join the retreating
column. All Union regiments were north of the river by 2:00, but the engineers
waited another forty-five minutes for stragglers and walking wounded to catch up
before they destroyed the worn-out, sinking pontoon bridge. The column limped
into Little Rock three days later. 41
The 2d Kansas Colored may have been the first black regiment to charge and capture
Confederate artillery. It is also possible that the men cheered “Remember Poison
Spring!” as they advanced. What seems certain is that they acted in that spirit and took
few, if any, Confederate prisoners. The officer who commanded the captured battery
reported three of his men “killed by negroes after they had surrendered.” Confederate
soldiers who wrote to their families soon after the battle mentioned seeing the corpses
of wounded men with throats cut and other mutilations. On the Union side, a soldier in
the 29th Iowa who had seen the 2d Kansas in action told his brother: “Our white negro
officers and the negroes want to kill every wounded reb they come to and will do it if
we did not watch them. . . . [O]ne of our boys seen a little negro pounding a wounded
reb in the head with the butt of his gun and asked him what he was doing: the negro
replied he is not dead yet! . . . [I]t looks hard but the rebs cannot blame the negroes for
it when they are guilty of the same trick both to the whites and negroes.” Like the U.S.
40 OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt. 1, pp. 666, 668–69, 677 (“I never”), 692, 712 (“large number”), 715
(“were inhumanly”), 757; pt. 3, p. 267. Report of the Adjutant General . . . of Kansas, p. 431; Urwin,
“‘We Cannot Treat Negroes,’” p. 196.
41 OR, ser. 1, vol. 34, pt. 1, pp. 670, 677, 689, 757–58, 787; Report of the Adjutant General . . . of
Kansas, pp. 421, 429; “The Camden Expedition,” (Lawrence) Kansas Daily Tribune, 15 February
1866 (quotation).